Avowed white supremacist is sentenced for trying to threaten the Jewish Community Center

An avowed white supremacist who tried to mail threatening letters to the Jewish Community Center in Whitefish Bay from an Oshkosh jail was sentenced Thursday to three years in federal prison.

Chadwick Grubbs, 33, will serve that time after he completes a four-year state prison term for threatening a state court judge and other sentences that will keep him in state prison until at least 2024.

Prosecutors recommended almost four years, while Grubbs' attorney said three years, concurrent to the state prison terms, would suffice.

U.S. District Judge Pamela Pepper imposed three years, consecutive to the state sentences, and added three years of supervision whenever Grubbs gets out of federal prison.

Grubbs was residing at the Winnebago County Jail in May 2017 when he sent the threats. But since he had used the wrong address, they were never delivered to the JCC and sheriff's investigators discovered the nature of the letters when they were returned to the jail.

They contacted the JCC and got the FBI involved.

That led to Grubbs' federal indictment on hate crimes in September 2018. He pleaded guilty in November.

In the letters, Grubbs asserts that he is a violent white supremacist and brags that he's already been convicted of a hate crime. He says he has an associate and access to weaponry and "dirty bombs" and promises "maximum carnage."

According to a sentencing memo from Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Haanstad, Grubbs has 19 prior adult convictions over 13 years, and several of the crimes were committed while serving sentences for others.

"There has been shockingly little interruption or decrease in severity in the defendant’s criminal conduct following prior convictions and sentences," Haanstad wrote.

"In fact, by some measures, it would appear that the levels of violence or threatened violence, as well as the frequency of that type of conduct, increased over time. To this point, neither supervision nor custody have significantly deterred the defendant."

In his own memo, Grubbs' attorney Anderson Gansner called him "a strange man, one with a history of bizarre acts, mental illness, and serious substance abuse." Grubbs grew up along the West Coast where he learned about white supremacist groups and got tattoos related to some.

He later moved to Wisconsin, in part, the memo suggests, because he was fearful of one such organization, the Insane Peckerwood Syndicate, based on the West Coast.

His attorney wrote that severe, untreated paranoia about the IPS probably led Grubbs to write the threats — signed with his full name and address in the jail — so he would be caught and kept in prison.

Contact Bruce Vielmetti at (414) 224-2187 or bvielmetti@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ProofHearsay.